This disclosure relates generally to the manufacture of ammunition, and specifically to reconditioning cartridge cases for reloading with an adjustable tool design that allows embodiments which, when used as a set, prepare cases for reloading.
Brass cartridge cases elongated with repeated firing and resizing. When a case exceeded the overall length specified for the cartridge, excess length was removed by trimming the open end, or mouth, on the neck of the case. For decades attempts were made to improve and simplify case preparation for reloading, also called handloading. Case trimming devices generally were a cutter on a hand cranked shaft, mounted on one end of a frame, which held the case at the other end. An early version was taught by Smiley in U.S. Pat. No. 2,406,170 issued 20 Aug. 1946, and a later motorized version was taught by Blodgett, et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,718,423 issued 17 Feb. 1998. Improvements by others included various case holders, including holding the case in a collet, a clamp, or in a die cradled on the frame. A different design, for a hand held tool, was taught by Lee, U.S. Pat. No. 3,555,641 issued 19 Jan. 1971, and used a fixed length guide, specific to a cartridge, inserted into the case with a narrow end extending through the flash hole to axially position the cutter and control the depth of cut by abutting a case holder. Other designs used motorized cutters on a drill press, or on a reloading press with, or in place of, a die. More recently, motorized trimmers were developed that indexed case length from a shoulder datum, as did the earlier hand cranked Jordan trimmer. Some examples were those taught by Gracey, U.S. Pat. No. 4,686,751 issued 18 Aug. 1987, Giraud, U.S. Pat. No. 6,484,616 issued 26 Nov. 2002, and Goodman, U.S. Pat. No. 8,827,607 issued 9 Sep. 2014.
After a case was trimmed to length, the steps of chamfering and deburring the case mouth were performed, mostly by hand held tools, which could be followed or preceded by cutting a burr from the flash hole, and uniforming neck thickness, also by hand held or hand cranked tools. Recently, case preparation machines, which were essentially motorized versions of the hand cranked device of Kolmer, U.S. Pat. No. 5,050,475 issued 29 Aug. 1989, were marketed. An example was taught by Cottrell, et al., U.S. Pat. No. 9,146,087 issued 29 Sep. 2015. These were known in the trade as case “prep centers”. On a prep center, a motor turned gears to turn multiple tools, and each case was manually applied to each twirling tool in sequence. Gripping each case, particularly small cases, against the torque of each cutting tool was fatiguing, especially for arthritic hands, when large batches of cases were prepared.
Because the cases were applied to the tools manually, the angles and depths of cuts were inconsistent, defeating one purpose of case preparation, which was to make all cases in a batch as uniform as possible. Case mouth chamfering and deburring tools, whether hand held or powered, suffered from the lack of a means to control the depth of cut. This often resulted in cuts of varying depth and concentricity, or a sharp edge on the case mouth. A tool taught by Carroll, U.S. Pat. No. 4,860,453 issued 29 Aug. 1989 had a guide to control concentricity, and some were adjustable in length for different cartridges, with adjustment tenuously held by a setscrew, but they were mostly hand operated tools. What was needed was an adjustable tool, which could be used by hand or on a case preparation machine, to chamfer and deburr case mouths uniformly to an adjustable depth.
Some cartridge case manufacturers drilled the primer flash hole. Most commonly flash holes were punched. Drilling or punching the flash hole could leave a burr inside the case which needed to be removed for uniform ignition. Various flash hole uniforming tools were developed, mostly hand held, and mostly based on machinists' center/countersink or similar drill bits. These generally enlarged flash holes to a uniform size and chamfered them. What was needed was an adjustable tool, which could be used by hand or on a case preparation machine, to remove a burr from the web on the inside of the case while leaving the flash hole a cylindrical orifice without chamfering or enlarging it.
Case neck turning tools were developed to remove material from the thicker areas on the neck of the case to align the bullet more concentrically with the bore. Most case neck turners had a cylindrical mandrel protruding from a circular ledge. A case neck was slid onto the mandrel, and the ledge was adjusted to serve as a stop for the case neck relative to the blade. The length of the cut was controlled by the case mouth being forced up to and bearing against the ledge while being turned by hand or a motor. This could mar the soft brass case mouth to varying degrees depending on the amount of force applied in turning the case against the hardened steel ledge. What was needed was an adjustable tool, which could be used by hand or on a case preparation machine, to turn case necks without marring the case mouth. Despite decades of attempts to improve case preparation crowding the field, cartridge case preparation remained the most onerous task in reloading.